This week I made a FabISP board which I'll be using to program future projects with.

Having used the Modela a significant amount this summer, there weren't really any surprises... I milled the traces, cutout the board, and stuffed it.

I knew programming the board wasn't going to be super trivial given the various versions of avrdude that are floating around on my computer.

I initialy tried stepping through the firmware uploading steps:

• make clean..... okay.
• make hex..... this might actually work.
• sudo make fuse...... doh! apparently "avrdude was compiled without usb support."

hmmm... some googling around led me to this page which told me I need to install libusb and recompile avrdude. Terminal tells me I'm using avrdude 5.10 ("avrdude --v") which is great... except for the fact that I have no idea where I compiled it from. After a lot of unsuccessful attempts of trying to install libusb (which I'm pretty sure I already have) and uninstalling avrdude I found this page which inspired me to just try downloading avrdude again and re-installing. So I downloaded avrdude 5.10 and did the whole ./configure, make, make install thing (all of which seemed to work). Then I tried "sudo make fuse" again and it worked! The "sudo make program" worked too!

Once I had loaded the software I desoldered the two jumpers (SJ1 and SJ2) and made myself a nice IDC cable connector.

After desoldering the jumpers, I reconnected it to the computer but there was another problem: it wasn't showing up as a USB device. I reflowed virtually every pad on the board and checked polarity of diodes and processors.... no luck.

I ended up just making another board. This time, it programmed successfully, I desoldered the jumpers, reconnected the board to the computer and it showed up as FabISP. Yay!!

Now it should theoretically be able to program another FabISP.... I connected the IDC cable to another board that still had its jumpers soldered. I plugged both boards into USB and modified the Makefile, replacing avrisp2 with usbtiny. I then tried the same "make clean", "make hex", "make fuse" but got an "rc = -1" error. Evidently this means that the computer sees the FabISP but can't communicate with it (or something).